The Immortal Irishman: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became an American HeroBy Timothy Egan Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (March 2016)​384 pages

Reviewed by R. Bryan Willits​The story of Thomas Francis Meagher ­– Irish revolutionary, exile, American Civil War general, and eventual governor of the Montana Territory – has long deserved to be told. In his 44 years on earth, Meagher careened his way over several continents, transgressed national and epochal boundaries, and became well acquainted with many of the influential individuals of his time, in effect becoming one himself. Telling the complex story of this man, and the pivotal moments in which he was involved, is what Timothy Egan set out to do in this biography, The Immortal Irishman: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became an American Hero. There is no doubt that researching and incorporating such a vast breadth of material into this story was a major challenge. Egan nevertheless produced a highly readable volume accessible to a general audience. While this book has already earned significant acclaim, it is not without flaws.

The New York Young Lords and the Struggle for LiberationBy Darrel Wanzer-SerranoTemple University Press (2016)

Reviewed by Lauren LeftyThe Young Lords have been enjoying their own nuevo despertar in the last few years, as a number of the city’s cultural institutions from El Museo del Barrio to the Bronx Museum hosted exhibits on the late sixties radical Puerto Rican organization. Darrel Wanzer-Serrano’s The New York Young Lords and the Struggle for Liberation is a welcome addition to this reawakening as the first book-length treatment of the East Coast branch of the party, which also had bases in Newark and Philadelphia in addition to its founding chapter in Chicago. The New York Lords only existed for a brief moment from 1969 to 1976, as a “revolutionary nationalist, antiracist, anti-sexist group who advanced a complex political program featuring support for the liberation of all Puerto Ricans (on the island and in the United States), the broader liberation of all Third World people, equality for women, U.S. demilitarization, leftist political education, redistributive justice, and other programs [that] fit into their ecumenical ideology" (5). Yet as Wanzer-Serrano notes, quoting Raymond Williams, they nonetheless provide “resources of hope” for today’s activists and anyone interested in the history and theory of radical social movements. While this book was published before the political upheavals of 2016, it seems all the more relevant for the current moment.

Editors' Note: This is part of a roundtable series,“New Histories of Education in New York City.” For an introduction and overview, click here. ​

In our fourth post, Lauren Lefty asks us what the story of community control looks like from a Puerto Rican perspective. She excavates histories of transnationalism and empire from above and below; elite ideas and policies from the “culture of poverty” to charter schools circulated between island and mainland, while grassroots organizers mobilized transnational networks along a “continual line of self-determination.” When we take empire and decolonization seriously, and see schools as “a key site to engage questions of sovereignty,” “local control” is not so local at all.

By Lauren Lefty

In a 1970 issue of Palante!, the Young Lords’ bi-monthly publication, Richie Peréz links the actions at Benjamin Franklin High School in East Harlem to the anti-imperial struggle being waged in Puerto Rico and the Third World more broadly.

Four years after the I.S. 201 controversy, and two years after the explosive 1968 teachers strikes, East Harlem’s Benjamin Franklin High School found itself at the center of yet another community control battle. After the transfer of a long-time principal to a nearby high school, community members decided to elect one of the acting deans to assume the vacant position, a former black teacher from the neighborhood who received local parents’ stamp of approval. After the Board of Education denied this request based on claims of inadequate qualification, students staged a walk-out, 4,400 pupils boycotted classes, and students and parent activists eventually occupied the building until their demands were met. The New York Times framed the event as yet another community control dispute in the black-white standoff that now characterized city politics. Yet what the Times reporter failed to mention were the Puerto Rican flags draped from the second floor windows of the brick building on Pleasant Ave., and the unique perspective the hundreds of involved Puerto Rican students, parents, and activists brought to the table. As Richie Perez phrased it in Palante!, the periodical of the Puerto Rican Young Lords, “The issue at Franklin is not just a matter of a principal. It’s a matter of whether of not we have the right to control our own lives…Seize the Schools! Que Viva Puerto Rico libre!”[1]

Sidney Hook (1902-1989) was one of the twentieth century’s most prolific and controversial intellectuals. Most people know him solely as John Dewey’s star disciple. But he was also in many ways Dewey’s successor -- far more engage than his mentor, though hardly inactive philosophically. As one of the twentieth century’s leading educational theoreticians and its foremost philosopher of democracy, Hook modified and applied Dewey’s concepts, usually assigned to elementary reform, to higher education -- to fend off what he perceived as authoritarian forces inside the classroom and without. Feted abroad as New York’s answer to Jean Paul Sartre in France and Bertrand Russell in Britain, this was, in fact, his most distinctive contribution to American intellectual history.

From the Know Nothings to Donald Trump, New York City has often been a hotspot of nativism. Back in the 1850s, the city’s nativism rose partly in reaction to waves of Irish immigrants coming in the wake of potato famine.While the Know Nothings found greater electoral success elsewhere, the roots of the officially named American Party were in New York.

Eric Walrond was far from alone in feeling the pull of poetry in 1922, arguably the most pivotal year in the history of African American verse. Claude McKay’s Harlem Shadows was published to acclaim; Jean Toomer put the final touches on Cane; Georgia Douglas Johnson published Bronze; and James Weldon Johnson published The Book of American Negro Poetry, the preface to which linked race progress to the arts. The tide was shifting as The Crisis began emphasizing the arts and the Urban League founded Opportunity in 1922. The transformation prompted one budding poet, a Columbia dropout, to begin thinking in terms of a movement. Writing Alain Locke, Langston Hughes said, “You are right that we have enough talent now to begin a movement. I wish we had some gathering place for our artists -- some little Greenwich Village of our own.” In Greenwich Village at that moment was another poet who would help realize their vision, the New York University student Countée Cullen, a Harlem product with several publications already to his name.